Leah Durant is the Executive Director of Progressives for Immigration Reform, a 501(c)(3) organization which seeks to examine the unintended consequences of U.S. immigration policies and strives to enhance the working conditions of people worldwide.

Prior to her tenure at Progressives for Immigration Reform, Ms. Durant served as an Attorney with the Civil Division of United States Department of Justice. Ms. Durant’s experience spans several years of involvement with population and sustainable living initiatives and examining the global impacts of U.S. population growth.

Who’s Who in America (2005) describes Professor Lawrence Fuchs as a government official and educator. A 2002 article by Brandeis professor Stephen J. Whitfield (Brandeis Review) classifies Fuchs according to four areas of achievement: Teaching, Scholarship, Community, and Public Service. In a letter to the Boston Globe (October 1960), Fuchs describes himself as a “political behaviorist.”

Lawrence H. Fuchs was born in New York City on Jan. 29, 1927 and received degrees from New York University (B.A., 1950) and Harvard University (Ph.D., 1955). He was a teaching fellow at Harvard from 1950-1951 and a member of the faculty at Brandeis University from 1952-2002, where he served as the Meyer and Walter Jaffe Professor of American Civilization and Politics.

Fuchs began his Brandeis career in the Department of Politics and eventually founded the American Studies Department in 1970. He served as the dean of faculty and was a four-term faculty representative to the Board of Trustees. While at Brandeis, Fuchs was granted a leave of absence to serve as the first head of the Peace Corps in the Philippines (1961-1963) and as a visiting professorship in Hawaii.

Fuchs’s works include: The Political Behavior of American Jews (1955); Hawaii Pono: A Social History (1961); John F. Kennedy and American Catholicism (1967); Those Peculiar Americans: The Peace Corps and American National Character (1968); American Ethnic Politics (1968); Family Matters (1973); The American Kaleidoscope: Race, Ethnicity, and the Civic Culture (1991); and Beyond Patriarchy: Jewish Fathers and Families (2000). Fuchs was also principal scholar of Black in White America (1974) and The American Experiment (1981) and published a revised version of his original work Hawaii Pono as Hawaii Pono = Hawaii the Excellent: An Ethnic and Political History (1992). In addition to his books, Fuchs published many journal articles and was an invited speaker at many social and political organizations.

Fuchs’s work outside of academia included the following:

• Head of the first Peace Corps unit in the Philippines (1961-1963) during the Kennedy administration. Founder of the Commonwealth Service Corps in Massachusetts, a domestic Peace Corps organization.
• Executive director of the Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy (1979-1981) under President Jimmy Carter. The recommendations made by this commission led to the first major reform of U.S. immigration policy since 1965: the Immigration and Control Act of 1986, and later the Immigration Act of 1990. Fuchs also served as vice chair of the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform.
• Service on bodies including: the National Advisory Board of the Commission on Law and Social Action of the American Jewish Congress; the Massachusetts Congress on Racial Equality; the United World Federalists; and the Mexican American Legal and Education Defense Fund.
• Chair of the Academic Council of the American Jewish Historical Society, and of the Advisory Committee of the School and Society Program of the Education Development Center (EDC).
• Participation in Facing History and Ourselves, a groundbreaking educational organization bringing ethnic relations and social history into the classroom.

William H. Frey is a Ph.D. demographer and sociologist specializing in U.S. demographics. He is currently a Senior Fellow with the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC and Research Professor at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research. Dr. Frey received his Ph.D. from Brown University in 1974. In 1980-81 he was a Visiting Research Scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (Austria); in 1988 the Andrew W. Mellon Research Scholar at the Population Reference Bureau, Washington, DC; and in 1995, Hewlett Visiting Scholar at Child Trends in Washington, D.C.

Otis L. Graham, Jr., was born 1935 and is a historian of modern America, a Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and is currently Visiting Scholar at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Edwin S. Rubenstein, President, ESR Research, economic consultants, has 25 years experience in business research, financial analysis, and economics journalism. Mr. Rubenstein joined Hudson Institute, a public policy think tank headquartered in Indianapolis, as Director of Research in November 1997. At Hudson he wrote proposals and conducted research on a wide array of topics, including workforce development, the impact of AIDS on South Africa’s labor force, Boston’s “Big Dig” the economic impact of transportation infrastructure, and the future of the private water industry in the U.S.

The Washington Post called Lester Brown “one of the world’s most influential thinkers.” The Telegraph of Calcutta refers to him as “the guru of the environmental movement.” In 1986, the Library of Congress requested his personal papers noting that his writings “have already strongly affected thinking about problems of world population and resources.”

Richard D. Lamm is Co-Director of the Institute for Public Policy Studies at the University of Denver, and the former three-term Governor of Colorado. (1975-1987) He is both a lawyer (Berkeley, 1961) and a Certified Public Accountant. He joined the faculty of the University of Denver in 1969 and has, except for his years as Governor, been associated with the University ever since.

Rev. Patrick Bascio is the author of On the Immorality of Illegal Immigration: A Priest Poses An Alternative Christian View (AuthorHouse 2009). In 2009, he retired as a pastor and Peace and Justice coordinator for the Holy Ghost Fathers in the Tobago Province of Trinidad. Previously, he was part of the diplomatic mission to the United Nations representing Grenada (with the rank of “Counselor”); and served for six years as pastor of a Catholic church in Harlem.

Susan Martin holds the Donald G. Herzberg Chair in International Migration and serves as the Director of the Institute for the Study of International Migration in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Previously Dr. Martin served as the Executive Director of the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform, established by legislation to advise Congress and the President on U.S. immigration and refugee policy, and Director of Research and Programs at the Refugee Policy Group.

Author and lecturer Roy Beck, executive director of NumbersUSA, has been one of the most visible chroniclers and spokesmen on the effects of mass immigration on quality of life issues in the United States. The Houston Chronicle labeled him “one of the five leading thinkers in the national immigration debate.” The prestigious Foreign Affairs journal stated that nobody has made a more persuasive case for cutting current high levels of immigration. “All sides can learn from Roy Beck,” said Business Week magazine.